Sajjad Zaidi's Blog

Last night's TPCUG meeting was one of the best I've been to yet and the first one this year. Freedom Lohr spoke about video editing and the Tokyo DV site that he is part of. His work has been quite popular on the internet and with other bloggers.

Now I have an urge to get a Mac and a video camera, but I'll try to hold off that temptation for a while, though I heard that older Macs have come down a lot in price.

It seems that the coalition troups have entered the holy city of Najaf and Saddam's forces have taken cover in the shrine of Imam Ali (A.S.). May they suffer God's wrath for putting the shrine at risk. Got this from Shi'a Pundit:

http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2492709

Iraqis fired on U.S.-led troops from inside the Ali Mosque in Najaf, an important Shi'ite Muslim shrine, on Wednesday but the Americans did not return fire, an official at U.S. war headquarters said.

At least the Americans have enough sense to avoid the shrine. After the Kaaba, this and the shrines in Karbala are the holiest places for Shi'a Muslims. Here is another BBC article on them:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2907201.stm

http://tv.yahoo.com/news/wwn/20030319/104808600007.html

NEW YORK -- Federal investigators have arrested an enigmatic Wall Street wiz on insider-trading charges -- and incredibly, he claims to be a time-traveler from the year 2256!

Good time to sell? Also from the article:

Officials are quite confident the "time-traveler's" claims are bogus. Yet the SEC source admits, "No one can find any record of any Andrew Carlssin existing anywhere before December 2002."

About 2 weeks ago, I subscribed to the RedHat Network and yesterday they released the latest version of their OS to subscribers. I tried downloading it last night, but their servers are extremely slow.

Now I am trying BitTorrent which uses a kind of peer-to-peer protocol and is written in Python. Not much luck yet though since I can't seem to connect to any other users.

Just registered for BlogShares. You get 500 virtual dollars with which you can buy shares in other blogs. Sounds fun.

Salam, the blogger from Baghdad, came back online on Monday after his connection was restored. Now, the BBC has an article on him:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2881491.stm

Robert Jackson was the Chief of Counsel for the United States in prosecuting the principal Axis War Criminals.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/jack02.htm

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

Despite the start of the war against Iraq, its good to see protests continuing. According to this article, more than a thousand people were arrested in San Francisco for taking part in one:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2871063.stm

"Anti-war demonstrators in New York completely blocked New York's Broadway for two blocks below 42nd Street, while hundreds of protesters gathered in Washington and at university campuses around the country."

I was reading a Slashdot article and upon reloading this page, got the data of the main page, with a Microsoft ad after every story. Strange.

When I tried to view the same page from another browser, I got a similar response, except the ads were for IBM.

There have been some discussions recently on the TPCUG health newsgroup about how much liquid the body needs. The general belief is that we should drink at least 8 glasses of water a day with some recommendations on having lots of water by your side and sipping as often as you can.

This article, however, shows a different view:

http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/03/14/water_glasses030314

Still, I am sticking to having hot water on my desk. It does feel strange at first, but you get used to it quite fast. Supposedly has lots of benefits, but could be just a myth like the above.

Last night's meetup was the best one out of the 3 I've been to. About 10 really interesting people showed up. I was a bit late so missed most of the conversation on blogging, but we continued to talk about Japan, languages and many more things.

I took lots of photos, but the group ones didn't come out well.

Off to the meetup in Harajuku. Lots of people are coming tonight so should be fun.

This term was coined during in a lunch conversation I was having with Tim and Stuart about a collaborative blog. Gangblogging will be the next big thing. You'll see. ;-)

Now have to decide if I want to use existing technology ( not usually my way of doing things, unfortunately) or spend the next 6 months writing something that I will be proud to say is mine, and outdated.

Looks like I might wake up tomorrow in the middle of a war:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2857789.stm

In other news, the mysterious virus continues to spread:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2856163.stm

Nice Howto on doing this:

http://www.networkdweebs.com/chroot.html

Stumbled upon some interesting facts during the weekend. I had always wondered who John the Baptist was and it turns out that he was the Prophet Yahya (a.s.), son of the Prophet Zachariya (a.s.) mentioned prominently in the Quran.

Also found this page about prophecies of the Prophet Muhammad (p.b.u.h.) in books from other religions:

http://www.ezsoftech.com/akram/prophetprophecies.asp

And this one counter-arguing some of the Bible ones:

http://www.word.org.uk/prophet.htm

But what I found really interesting was from Genesis 17:20, which mentions '12 princes' in the line of Ishmael (a.s.). The Shias believe in 12 Imams after the Prophet Muhammed (p.b.u.h).

I had an appearance in Stuart's dream on Friday:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/stuartcw/day/2003/03/14

Ashura is the 10th of the month of Muharram. It is the day Imam Hussein and his companions were martyred at Kerbala. For Shia Muslims, it is the most important day of the year and is spent mourning. Exchanging greetings is generally encouraged by Islam, but on this day we avoid that along with food, drinks and anything associated with merriment as a sign of respect.

Read about this concept on Slashdot last week and just found a link to the a site that describes it in more detail:

http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html

"IM2000 is a project to design a new Internet mail infrastructure around the following concept: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility."

Looks similar to IMAP and quite efficient since mail can be filtered before it gets anywhere near you and puts more responsibility on the senders. It has some noticable flaws, but could be a step in the right direction to curb unsolicited mail.

Until now, I was using MPlayer for playing DVDs, but couldn't find out if it could do menus. I decided to try out Ogle which installed easily from RPM packages and worked out of the box.

There were some obvious bugs/limitations such as the control panel not responding when trying to stop or forward, but the menus worked perfectly and I could get subtitles too. Switching between different audio channels was really simple and could be done while playing, unlike with MPlayer (afak). Another thing I noticed was that the audio was much better than MPlayer. After digging a little deaper, I realised that MPlayer was using 'esd' for sound instead of 'sdl' which sounds amazingly better.

I'll probably stick to MPlayer for a while though just because of the speed and flexibility. Specially now that it sounds so much better.

Just created the document for setting this up. It is available at http://sajjadzaidi.com/exim/bogofilter.html. Will add some info on configuring Mutt to work with Bogofilter soon.

Yesterday marked the start of the month of Muharram, the first in the lunar calendar. This month starts with the biggest event of the year for many Muslims: the mourning of the death of Hussein, the prophet Muhammad's grandson.

He, along with his 71 companions, was murdered at Kerbala, in present day Iraq, by an army sent by the self-proclaimed leader of the faithful, Yazid, after their refusal to acknowledge him as the leader. The remaining women and children were taken prisoner and brought to Damascus, Yazid's capital.

Written by David Warren, it describes some similarities and differences between Islam and other religions:

http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/Miscell/index02.shtml

The first part reminded me of how much I miss Lahore. My brother is currently studying there.

Saw this at last on Saturday. Really enjoyed it and have to see it again soon, but my expectations were a little too high. It was close to the book, but changed pace a bit too fast. I was expecting a more constant pace, building up to the battle at Helms Deep.

Most of it was just like I had imagined it, with the exception of the battle, Gollum and the Ent's attack on Orthanc. I couldn't get the visualization right for any of them before and the movie fixed it.

Since I will be speaking at the next TLUG meeting, I decided to search for something quick and simple. OperaShow, using HTML, is what I finally settled on.

It allows you to divide a normal web page into 2 documents so you see the normal document in the browser, but if you press F11, it switches to presentation mode.

First the plane crash in Iran that killed 302 people and now another one in Pakistan. This time it took the Air Force Chief.

This is something I have wanted to try for a long time, but never got a chance to do. Yesterday, I managed to get Mosix running on a couple of machines. One of the machines is about twice as fast as the other so I don't think it is an ideal environment, but worth the knowledge I gained. When a cpu intensive process is run on one node you can see the load shifting to the 2nd one, though 'top' doesn't see any difference.

Scyld seems to be a better solution for clustering, but it isn't free. I think they have a stripped down free version, but I couldn't find it.